Snakebitten
by Kamui Senketsu
Summary: What ever happened to the red one after the white one took over? No one knows there is anything to be known about such a person. And he is fine with that. Just a little something about how Red became Allen.


**Isn't this weird? I haven't written a fic for a differen't fandom before. Let's see how this goes. I love reading fics about Red, so I thought I'd write one for him and how he went away, replaced by Allen.**

 **I don't own D. Gray Man**

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 _"I was snake-bitten. You know what that means? ...I attract bad luck. Everything I touch turns to garbage. But it's not my fault. I'm jinxed. Nothing ever goes my way."_

 _-Benton Farland_

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When he was just a boy, he'd had his fortune told to him by a grinning old crone with more holes in her mouth than teeth.

She'd told him something that he had always known, something that anyone could see just by looking into his bitter moon lit eyes, or glancing at the oven mitten hiding the hideous truth hanging limply at his side.

She'd told him that he was snakebitten. Which was just a fancy way of saying that he was unlucky, that he was an unfortunate person who hadn't done anything to really deserve it, but that's how it was and that's how it would be.

He'd left her little shabby scam running tent scowling, because he knew that even if she was a con artist who was paid to lie, that she had told the truth in that moment. He hadn't asked her for her "fortune telling", he'd really just been going to give her food for her lunch break, as it was his job to run little errands like so, but many people seemed to enjoy throwing his circumstances into his face. It probably made them feel better about how pathetic they themselves were. By rubbing into his wounds with salt, they could safely think, "well, at least I'm not as pitiful as him".

That's how it was. He knew, and so did they; such was life. His life at least.

But then stumbled in the clown, goofy and out of his mind. The bloody fool couldn't even be bothered to give him his own name, but still. _Still_ somehow he had grown attached.

When the carriage flattened the madman, leaving him alone in the world again, something inside of him that he didn't realize he still had was ripped open. It kept bleeding and bleeding until he himself was mad with grief.

He'd listened to the sinister one who offered to bring the mad clown back, even knowing that it was utterly foolish to do so. But inside, somewhere within him he was hoping that whatever the sinister man's motives were, it would at least end with he himself dead, so that he could escape the awful and maddening ache in his chest. It was cowardly, but he hadn't had the nerve to off himself, just as he hadn't in any of the years before the mad clown, despite how often he had thought about it.

So he'd called out to the crazy dead bastard, buried under dirt just like the dog he'd named his charge after. He called like the lost, and stupid child he knew he was, and to his astonishment the madman came back to him. But, his unlucky hand in life appeared again, and the ugly dead weight at his side awakened with a ferocity he hadn't known possible, ripping through the only person he had truly loved in his short and pointless existence.

He was cursed for his selfishness, the truth carved into his face as a blazing red scar for all the world to see.

The sinister man left at some point, probably losing interest in him. Who knew, all he really knew was that he was still alive, and that the pain inside was even more unbearable with the newfound guilt that accompanied it.

He sat at the mad man's grave for days, his hair gradually fading to a colorless hue as he stared ahead at nothing.

He was baffled.

How could he have done such a _stupid_ thing? Why did he even allow himself to care about another person to such a degree? He knew that misfortune was his only true companion, and to hope for anything else was foolish, because if on the off hand he was given something good, it would soon be taken away.

Honestly he hadn't even known he _could_ care about another person so deeply. How could he have depended on someone who barely knew the difference between him and his dead dog on a good day? A stupid mad man who wasn't a man at all, but a child just like him? Why had he loved that person? Why did he even have the capacity to care for other things when all it brought was pain?

God how pathetic was he? He actually missed a man that named him after an old dog, and then proceeded to mistake him periodically for said dog on and off, as if it wasn't sad enough that he thought his dog had talked.

He missed that carefree and silly madness, and with it gone his own loomed darkly over his huddled, shivering form. Because he was tired again somewhere beyond the bones, he left his pain to the white one.

The one who still somehow yearned for love and acceptance, for warmth and happiness. But he shouldn't say "the one", because it was not a person. That thing was a piece of himself that he despised. The white one was the lonely child within him that yearned for all the sugary things normal children had, the part of him that had made him love that dotty old clown.

He was the red one, and he was done. He'd leave it to the white one, because that guy seemed to be able to take all the beatings life loved to give his heart and soul. The white one's resilience was the only reason why the red one was still alive.

So he pulled back, and curled up in the darkness in the back of his mind, knowing that somewhere along the line that he'd gone just as mad as the clown he'd called father, and the white one took over.

He didn't care to watch as the white one put on a mask that reflected the mad man in his lucid moments.

The white one took the name Allen Walker from the red one's hands, much like a person happily did with a new coat, and shrugged it on. And he, the red one that is, gave the name away with no fuss, and then he went and cried himself to sleep in the dark. When the red one fell asleep, deep beneath the surface, all that appeared to be there was Allen.

But even as Allen grew, kind and forgiving and hopeful, the red one's misfortune clung to him.

Though, because he was just as mad as the clown whose footsteps he traced, he went on anyway, smiling like a fool as he was stabbed in the heart over and over again by tragedy.

But such was life. Allen's life now, because that's the way it was and that's the way it would be.

Allen lived, until the smiling mask became his real face, and the red one slumbered in the darkness, content to sleep forever.


End file.
